This past year was a killing ground, but also a proving
ground. Huge, massively-hyped projects crashed and burned, but there were also
some surprising hits. And in the midst of this carnage, a few stark truths.
Here are 10 lessons we hope the entertainment industry learns from 2013.

Top image: Oblivion.

1) If your movie's
third act is weak, that's a problem with your first two acts

That's almost a direct quote from Joss
Whedon, and it was never truer than in 2013. So many movies this year had
third acts that fell horribly flat, or felt tacked on. We witnessed so many
endings that seemed to have nothing to do with the rest of the movie we'd just
been watching, or films that seemed to have been going pretty well until the
final reel. So take it from Whedon: The seeds to the movie's ending should be
in its beginning. [Update: Various people have pointed out Whedon was actually quoting Billy Wilder.]

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2) Dark fantasy and
horror can support a lot of crazy

So much crazy. Pretty much all the crazy. This year, American Horror Story wasn't always the
weirdest thing on television. Game of
Thrones got even more berserk, and meanwhile there were tons of offshoots
like Sleepy Hollow, Witches of East End and Dracula, all competing to see who could
go the most bonkers. It was a year where water-cooler discussions could have included
"penis-leeching" and "Asgardian witches." And these shows
— along with the two Once Upon a Time and
Vampire Diaries shows — got away
with perversity that few shows in other genres could have dared attempt.
(Including science fiction.) There seems to be a certain license to go way, way
over the top in the fantasy/horror genre right now — and let's hope creators keep exploiting it.

3) Nobody will go out
to theaters for generic pretty any more. Nobody.

One thing unites a lot of the year's biggest movie failures,
from Oblivion to Elysium to Ender's Game:
nondescript pretty images of spaceships and CG scenery. The thing we heard over
and over about a lot of these movies is, "It looks just like everything
else." It's the Tron-ification
of movies: everything has the same blue-tinged color scheme and the same slow
epic feel, and there's absolutely no sense that the movie is telling a unique
story. Let's hope in years to come, movies are still pretty — but distinctive,
and with a clearer emphasis on an original story. Meanwhile, there was a lot of
talk about how "trailer moments" — like all those cities being
destroyed in every movie — feel gratuitous and just thrown in for the trailer,
and maybe need an actual story to support them.

4) Female heroes are
made of money.

Katniss Everdeen scored again this year, but it was also a
great year for Sandra Bullock. And Frozen
was one of the most successful films of the year as well, with its focus almost
entirely on the two sisters, who carry the story.Meanwhile, on television, it felt as though
more shows were including competent, tough female characters without needing to
make them cry every few minutes. We still have a long way to go, but it's
harder and harder to claim that female heroes can't bring an audience.

5) Book publishing is
in free-fall, so you might as well go nuts

Author Neil Gaiman made this point in a couple of speeches
this past year: one at the London Book Fair, and the other at the World Fantasy
Awards in Brighton. In a nutshell, traditional publishing models are falling
apart, everything is failing, and nobody knows what works any more. So you
might as well do what you want to. In Brighton, Gaiman advised authors that now
is the time to do that crazy project that nobody thinks you can get away with
— because there's no guarantee that playing it safe will result in success,
either. And indeed, this was a year where some middle-of-the-road book projects
that everybody seemed to think were the next big thing seemed to vanish without
a trace.

6) Don't remake stuff
that nobody remembers

We kind of gave
this lesson last year — but it bears repeating. Who thought that The Lone Ranger had a huge following
that would rush out to see a movie version of a decades-old serial? (Probably
the same people who thought Dark Shadows
still had a huge fanbase.) Similarly, what made people think The Tomorrow People, an obscure British series
from the 1970s, had huge name recognition? We're probably never going to be
able to stop the flood of remakes and reboots, but it's kind of weird when
studios choose to remake stuff that absolutely nobody feels nostalgia for.
Instead of these projects, we could have gotten brand new stories that included
some of the same elements but ditched a lot of the problematic baggage.

This was a year of massive victories and horrendous defeats. Science fiction and fantasy rocked pop …
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7) Chemistry is
everything, especially on television

When you look at the TV shows that did well this past fall,
they were generally the ones which featured strong chemistry between a pair of
leads. Particularly thinking of Sleepy
Hollow and Almost Human here —
the buddy-cop chemistry in both those shows is undeniable. These shows featured
conflict and differences between their leads, but also characters who clicked
and formed an unconventional friendship from the very first episode. Whereas network
shows where the main character forms no strong friendships, or is at odds with
everyone, seemed to do less well. To some extent, we still watch television to
be with our friends, and to bask in the fantasy of having a great friendship.

8) The young-adult
book boom is not going to translate to movies.

We'll see if Divergent
seems to be the exception to the rule — but based on the performance of Beautiful Creatures, Mortal Instruments, The Host and some other films, I wouldn't bet on any YA adaptations
that aren't Twilight or Hunger Games — both of which were books
that crossed over and became huge with mainstream audiences. Even Stephenie
Meyer couldn't score a non-Twilight
hit this year. The one exception was Warm
Bodies, which played more like a comedy and had a more modest budget.

9) Netflix and DVRs
have changed everything forever

This was the year that Netflix really started to crush with
its original TV series, rapidly moving from a content conduit to a content
creator and scoring some major award nods. And meanwhile, you hear less and
less about live viewing and more and more about "live plus same day"
or "live plus seven day" viewing — because nobody watches TV the old
way any more. People binge-watch, and watch on a delay, and generally skip the
commercials. The old models of television production are going away, faster
than anybody was prepared for.

10) Start slow, and
you can eventually go pretty darn science-fictional

The first couple years that Person of Interest was on television, people kept claiming it
wasn't really science fiction, or complaining that the science-fiction elements
were downplayed too much. No longer. This was the year that PoI started talking
a lot more about artificial intelligence and the implications of artificial
consciousness, and how a self-aware computer could change everything. And its
audience did not waver — it's still getting upwards of 12 million viewers
every week, even with a new timeslot, because it hooked us with characters and
a strong procedural aspect before slowly ramping up the science fiction
elements. Meanwhile, other shows that tried to foreground their gee-whiz
premises early on, or emphasized fantastical world-building over
character-building, have struggled.